A few Blacks have cozied up to Donald Trump and have made a complete ass of themselves by wearing his cheap Chinese-made (MAGA) caps, which of course are just another symbol of hatred as the Confederate flag is.
Some have even gone as far as to confront anti-Trump demonstrators in the streets making an even more ridiculous spectacle of themselves.
Then, of course, there are the Black Pastors, how could we ever forget those imposters?
Donald Trump encouraged his manic supporters to beat up people who demonstrated at his rallies, Black demonstrators were assaulted in the process.
At the time he was telling Africa-Americans how badly their schools and community sucked, how poor they are, how horrible their neighborhoods are, he was asking “what do you have to lose”?
He was telling police simultaneously not to be gentle with suspects, they are arresting.“When you arrest them and put your hand o top of their heads while putting them in the car, you can pull that hand away”, Trump tells cops.
What Trump did not know was that those hands never existed for Black suspects in the first place. So while he was goading cops into abusing people, (wink, wink, black people) he was opening a Pandora-box of police abuse which would not be confined to black suspects but whites as well, gender would not be a factor either.
My personal disdain is reserved for the pastors, however. Not because of any personal power they possess to influence intelligent members of the Black community. But because of the innocent naïveté‘ of poor religious folk who put their faith in these pseudo- mendicants, believing they are truly sent by God Almighty, when they are agents of the Devil.
After using them to create a façade of inclusion before stealing the 2016 elections, the con artiste Trump predictably dumped them like the garbage trucks dump New York City’s garbage over there on the west side of Manhattan.
There may yet be a resurgence of this recycled garbage as the 2020 election cycle rolls around. After all, getting a handshake or a pat on the back is more than enough for some of these house slaves.
Despite my aversion to these pastors, what I really wanted to bring to your attention was really an answer to Trump’s question of “what do you have to lose”?
In addition to the fact that the lives of African-Americans have gotten worse under Trump’s policies, a‑la increased police abuse, stagnant wages, etc.
There is much more that does not readily meet the eyes.
And so we will introduce an awesome Article written by Isaac Arnsdorf of ProPublica, titled How a Top Chicken Company Cut Off Black Farmers, One by One.
After years of working as a sheriff’s deputy and a car dealership manager, John Ingrum used his savings to buy a farm some 50 miles east of Jackson, Mississippi. He planned to raise horses on the land and leave the property to his son. The farm, named Lovin’ Acres, came with a few chicken houses, which didn’t really interest Ingrum. But then a man showed up from Koch Foods, the country’s fifth-largest poultry processor and one of the main chicken companies in Mississippi. Koch Foods would deliver flocks and feed — all Ingrum would have to do is house the chicks for a few weeks while they grew big enough to slaughter. The company representative wowed Ingrum with projections for the stream of income he could earn, Ingrum recalled in an interview.
What Ingrum didn’t know was that those financial projections overlooked many realities of modern farming in the U.S., where much of the country’s agricultural output is controlled by a handful of giant companies. The numbers didn’t reflect the debt he might have to incur to configure his chicken houses to the company’s specifications. Nor did they reflect the risk that the chicks could show up sick or dead, or that the company could simply stop delivering flocks. And that growing concentration of corporate power in agriculture would only add to the long odds Ingrum, as a black farmer, faced in the United States, where just 1.3% of the country’s farmers are black. The shadow of slavery, sharecropping, and Jim Crow has left black farmers in an, especially precarious position. Their farms tend to be smaller and their sales lower than the national average, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While white farmers benefited from government assistance such as the Homestead Act and land-grant universities, black farmers were largely excluded from owning land and accumulating wealth. In recent decades, black farmers accused the USDA of discriminating against them by denying them loans or forcing them to wait longer, resulting in a class-action lawsuit that settled for more than $1 billion. Along with these historical disadvantages, black farmers say they have also encountered bias in dealing with some of the corporate giants that control their livelihood. In complaints filed with the USDA between 2010 and 2015, Ingrum and another black farmer in Mississippi said Koch Foods discriminated against them and used its market control to drive them out of business.
After the complaints by the farmers, an investigator for the USDA, which is responsible for regulating the industry, looked into Koch Foods’ dealings with those farmers and found “evidence of unjust discrimination,” according to a 700-page case file obtained by ProPublica. The investigator concluded that Koch Foods violated a law governing meat companies’ business practices. The Trump administration has cut back on enforcing this law, with the USDA now conducting fewer investigations and imposing fewer fines, as ProPublica has reported. Koch Foods hasn’t faced any penalty. Koch Foods declined to provide an interview with any of its executives or to answer detailed questions about its dealings with black farmers in Mississippi. A lawyer for the company said it denies wrongdoing. The five largest chicken companies now make up 61% of the market, compared with 34% in the hands of the top four firms in 1986. As the biggest companies expanded their control, they raised farmers’ average pay by a mere 2.5 cents a pound from 1988 to 2016, while the wholesale price of chicken rose by 17.4 cents a pound, according to data from the USDA and the National Chicken Council.
Mississippi is the fifth-largest poultry-producing state, with more than 1,300 chicken farms. In a state where the population is 38% black, only 96 of those farms were operated by African Americans in 2012, the most recent USDA data available. From 2009 to 2017, Koch Foods went from having contracts with four black farmers in Mississippi to zero. Koch (pronounced “cook”) Foods is based outside Chicago and supplies chicken, often sold under other brands, to major restaurants and retailers such as Burger King, Kroger, and Walmart. The company, which is privately held, is not part of the business empire of the conservative billionaires Charles Koch and David Koch. The owner of Koch Foods, Joseph Grendys, has a fortune that Forbes estimates at $3.1 billion
After Ingrum signed his contract to grow chickens for Koch Foods, in 2002, different company representatives kept coming with lists of expensive modifications they wanted Ingrum to make, according to an affidavit he provided to the USDA investigator. After Ingrum met all the specifications, the next representative went back on what the previous one said and wanted things done a different way, Ingrum said in the affidavit. Chicken companies usually say they update their specifications to improve animal welfare or respond to consumer preferences like avoiding antibiotics. But Ingrum couldn’t find much logic in the changes Koch Foods wanted him to make. One service technician directed Ingrum to install lights in one place, the next one someplace else. Another time, the company wanted Ingrum to move a power line, even though it was out of the way of the feed trucks and bins. That cost him $6,000.
According to Ingrum’s affidavit, when he met with a manager about the shifting demands, the manager said, derisively, “I had a couple of y’all when I was at Sanderson,” another big chicken company. Ingrum asked the manager, who was white, what he meant by that. The manager didn’t answer Ingrum. Reached by ProPublica on his cellphone, the manager hung up. Ingrum suspected that the truck drivers who delivered feed were shortchanging him, so he installed sensors to alert him when the drivers arrived. In 2007, according to his affidavit, Ingrum caught a driver failing to fill a whole feed bin. The company brushed it off as an honest mistake. But Ingrum had heard of drivers asking farmers for payoffs to get more feed, according to the affidavit.
Read more here;
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-a-top-chicken-company-cut-off-black-farmers-one-by-one